122 EDwARD M. HARRIS
was made, these records provide evidence for conveyances, which could be
used to prove title. They do not prove that the owner possessed title to a given
property; they showed only that he had gone through a certain process before
the sale. But evidence showing that the sale was legitimate helped to prove
ownership. In case of a dispute, the owner could appeal to this record and the
testimony of the poletai. Most importantly, the procedure helped to reduce
transaction costs for buyers and imposed only a very low fee (1 percent of the
purchase price) for registration.
It is interesting to note the residence of the buyers and the location of
the properties in these records. As de Soto notes, in the absence of property
records it is difficult to verify ownership; it often requires long negotiations
with neighbors to discover the actual status of a given property. For this reason,
in regions where there are no property records most exchanges of assets occur
between neighbors.^35 The poletai records show, however, that property in Attica
was often sold to those outside the immediate community. In his study of the
hekatoste inscriptions, Lambert finds evidence for 144 sales of land.^36 In roughly
half of these groups there is no information about the location of the property
and/or the identity of the buyer. In the cases where we can identify the loca-
tion of the property and the residence of the buyer (in at least twenty-three
cases, possibly twenty-five), the buyer purchases property in his own deme.
What is striking, however, is that in twenty-one cases the buyer comes from
outside the deme where the property is found (see Appendix I). In a few cases
the deme of the buyer is close to the location of the property. For instance, in
two cases (#78 and #80) the buyer comes from the Piraeus and purchases land
in Phaleron, an adjacent deme. But in most other cases the buyer purchases
property that is in another part of Attica. In one case (#113) a buyer from the
city of Athens bought property on Salamis. The case of the philosopher Plato
is interesting in this regard: his deme was Kollytos in the city of Athens, and
he acquired land for his Academy just outside the city (Plut. Mor. 603b; Diog.
Laert. 3.20), but he also purchased land at Iphistiadai near Kephisia, some dis-
tance from the city (Diog. Laert. 3.41). This evidence confirms de Soto’s insight
that records to prove title will result in the ownership of land circulating out-
side a small restricted circle.
The records of payment of the 1-percent tax were not the only documen-
tation of sales. The poletai also kept records of properties that had been confis-
cated and sold to new owners.^37 The most famous example is a set of records
for the property confiscated from those who were convicted of impiety during
the affair of the desecration of the Herms and the parody of the Mysteries in415.^38 These records do not give a helpful description of the land that is sold,
but the records of the property confiscated from the Thirty in 403/2 BCE and
sold are more informative.^39 There is the name of the person who reported
the property with his demotic, followed by the verb ‘reported’ (ἀπέγραφεν) ,